The death of Rep. C.W. Bill Young produced a melee among his family, staffers and others entrusted with the Florida Republican's legacy. Longtime Young Chief of Staff Harry Glenn has found himself in the middle of some of these fights, and he provided CQ Roll Call with his own timeline surrounding the events in question.
2006: St. Petersburg College reaches out about building a Rep. C.W. Bill Young archive, floats an offer to have the lawmaker join the faculty upon retirement.
2007: Young opens his Seminole office; memorabilia gets shipped to SPC routinely for a few years. An SPC librarian/aspiring archivist spearheads the organizational effort until around 2009.
2009: Display cases are unveiled, original exhibits go up in the SPC hallways.
Late spring/early summer 2013: An estate appraiser/auctioneer hired by Young and his wife, Beverly, arrives at the Rayburn office, gathers up various pieces of high-profile correspondence (notes from various presidents, other novel missives) and whisks them away for potential sale.
Summer 2013: Young and his wife remove an unknown quantity of precious coins from the office safe in Rayburn.
Oct. 19, 2013: Beverly and Patrick Young visit the D.C. office, gather up some personal belongings (enough to fill 1 ½ cars being driven back to Florida). “They visited and selected things they wanted to pack up and take home. There were two SUVS that were packed to the gills,” Harry Glenn, the lawmaker's chief of staff, recounted.
Oct. 25, 2013: Beverly and Patrick Young visit the Seminole office, reclaim another batch of possessions. “They took some items out of the office and out of the hallway display cases.”
November 2013: Additional items Beverly Young requested to be removed from the office are loaded onto a moving truck that had been secured to clear everything out of the Youngs' condominium in Arlington, Va.
Late November 2013: Glenn personally delivers breakable items from the office and jewelry left behind in the Arlington condo to Beverly Young after driving it from D.C. to Florida.
January 2014: Beverly and Billy Young visit the Seminole office to reclaim more stuff. “They just mainly went through the Seminole congressional office and took some things out of there that they wanted,” Glenn said.
February 2014: Beverly Young requests that everything in the display cases be boxed up for retrieval. “But they were never picked up by the Youngs,” Glenn said. Those items, he said, were eventually deposited in the storage locker with the rest of the collected memorabilia.
Late February 2014: Remaining items in the Rayburn office are cataloged, packaged and shipped to the University of South Florida, which agrees to take possession of some 250 boxes of Young’s papers to create a legislative library and promises to send along the remaining memorabilia to SPC. Shipment was received by the USF on March 17, 2014.
April 14, 2014: Capitol Police Special Agent Sean Camp calls asking about a commemorative shell casing; Glenn said Van Scoyoc Associates immediately agrees to relinquish possession. “We were both in Florida, but two staff people from our office took it down and met the Capitol policeman that day, the day of the call, and handed it off to him." Glenn said. "We got a receipt acknowledging receipt and the Capitol Police took responsibility for shipping it to her.”
May 2014: Camp reaches out about the pictures of the lawmaker — a cache Beverly Young would later come to learn includes a photo of her husband and son Patrick taken by Roll Call at the 1988 GOP convention in New Orleans, an autographed shot of the lawmaker with Speaker Thomas "Tip" O'Neill and more that Beverly Young is determined to track down. “I said, ‘Look, I had nothing to do with that. That was with Congressman Jolly and the college.’ So I called Congressman Jolly, he called the police officer and the police officer made arrangements to pick them up that day. I presume the Capitol Police shipped them back to Mrs. Young. I don’t know. I was no longer a federal employee at the time,” Glenn said.
Related:
Bill Young’s Family and Staff Inherit a Nightmare
The Bill Young Saga: Items the Family Has Yet to Recoup
The 114th: CQ Roll Call's Guide to the New Congress
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